Smart Contracts and the Challenges of their Contemporary Applications

Abstract

Smart contracts are among the contracts included in the applications of artificial intelligence through what is known as the Block Chain, which has brought about major radical changes in the world of finance, economics and international trade, as well as many other fields. Through this technology, contracts and transactions can be concluded in a direct and completely automated manner. It is encrypted through software that implements the terms of the contract or transaction automatically without the need for human intervention and without the mediation of a third party or any central entity.

There is no doubt that smart contracts have become of great importance in our besieged lives in various fields that use Block Chain technology in their transactions, which has raised a number of legal problems worthy of attention and study by researchers, the most prominent of which is the formula and mechanism by which It involves concluding a contract, as well as proving and interpreting it, and its implications.

Therefore, this research entitled (Smart Contracts and the Challenges of Their Contemporary Applications) came to address the legal aspects of this new form of contracts and the challenges and problems that accompany them. The researcher followed the descriptive and analytical approach in his study and treatment of this topic. The researcher paved the way for his treatment of this topic with an introduction in which he reviewed the definition of the research topic, its problem, its importance, its objectives, the methodology that the researcher followed in preparing it, the scope of the research, and its divisions that came in two chapters. The first dealt with the concept of smart contracts, its connection to blockchain technology, and the most important applications of smart contracts in contemporary reality, while the second chapter addressed the legal provisions of this type of contract, by explaining its formation, the legal challenges of its uses, and finally, the study of civil liability for damages resulting from its uses.

The study concluded with a number of results, perhaps the most prominent of which is the difficulty of determining the necessary eligibility of both parties to the smart contract, in addition to the difficulty of interpreting the smart contract due to it being written in a programming language that only those with specializations understand and decode, in addition to the inability to modify the smart contract in the event of emergency circumstances or its breaking in the event of an accident. A case of force majeure. Therefore, the most important recommendations of this study were the necessity of enacting special legislations to regulate smart contracts, in addition to the necessity of surrounding the stage of concluding the smart contract with clear provisions that give the contract a contractual character.